A sideways look at this week in the world of business compiled by Laura Slattery.
THE NUMBERS
$440,000- the budget for the swanky corporate retreat at a luxurious Californian beachside resort that was hosted by insurance giant AIG just days after it accepted an $85 billion emergency loan from the US government.
€50,000- the cost of the e-mail sent by the son of Irish Nationwide boss Michael Fingleton, which extolled the virtues of the Government's guarantee scheme in order to drum up deposit business. The Financial Regulator fined the bank this sum for failing to act "professionally".
QUOTE OF THE WEEK 1
"We see it now in the collapse of the great banks that money disappears, it's nothing."- Pope Benedict sparks a fresh panic on the stock market as he helpfully writes down the collective value of global financial assets to zero.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK 2
"I don't know if another bank has fallen." - Gordon Brown cracks one of the best-received jokes of his career after a mobile phone interrupts a dinner speech on the day that he announced a part-nationalisation of the British financial system.
GOOD WEEK
Neel Kashkari
AKA "the $700 billion man", the appropriately named Kashkari is the lucky soul charged with the management of the US government's banking bailout, meaning he controls some of the longest purse strings in the world. The 35-year-old former aerospace trainee worked for Nasa before he fell in with a bad crowd at Goldman Sachs, a move which eventually led to his appointment as head of the oxymoronically named Office of Financial Stability.
Robert Peston
The BBC's star business editor has "an enormous degree of power", the House of Lords was told this week. Peston, who used his curiously feverish diction to deliver a panic-inducing scoop on the Northern Rock collapse last year, is once again being praised/attacked for being too good for his job after he broadcast leaks about the British bank rescue talks that sent inevitable reverberations around fragile world stock markets.
BAD WEEK
Iceland
The global financial crisis has moved on from eliminating mere banks and is now attempting to scalp entire countries. Shares in Icelandic banks were suspended, financial institutions were ordered to sell off foreign assets - including a stake in Irish food group Greencore - and the government passed emergency legislation in order to avoid what prime minister Geir Haarde described as "national bankruptcy".
AIB
Hair-raising slashes in its share price were not the only bad headline for the biggest Irish bank: its misery was compounded when it made a six-figure damages settlement with racehorse trainer Jim Bolger after he took a six-year High Court legal action against the bank for fleecing him on his account. The settlement is understood to be more than €320,000 - roughly translating as the cost of sending six unprofessional e-mails.
